ROME—The wake-up call came at 6:30 a.m. last Sunday for the 190 boys of Toronto’s St. Michael’s Choir School. It was going to be a long day.

It was also, school director Stephen Handrigan told the preteen and teenage boys, going to be the biggest day of their lives. They were going in their ties and blazers to sing pontifical high mass in the world’s most famous church, St. Peter’s Rome.

This was to be no Roman holiday. As part of their 75th anniversary Italian tour, they had already spent a few days in Florence, getting over jet lag, seeing some sights and singing at Sacro Cuore Church.

Now it was down to real work, with principal conductor Jerzy Cichocki and his two associates, Charissa Bagan and Teri Dunn, even having managed the previous evening to squeeze in a short dining room rehearsal following their bus trip through Tuscany, as dinner dishes were being cleared.

“This is what happens in Rome,” shrugged Cichocki before starting the improvised rehearsal. “Just a few minutes ago I was finally given the Pater Noster we are supposed to sing tomorrow. You have to go with the flow.”

The flow continued Sunday morning in a convoy of four buses heading down a winding road toward Vatican City, the world’s smallest sovereign state, with staff chaperones and conductors using whatever time they could to warm up youthful voices and tone down youthful high spirits.

“It isn’t as big as I thought,” observed one of the boys upon entering the enormous expanse of St. Peter’s Square, prompting a loud chuckle from Father Michael Busch, rector of St. Michael’s Cathedral, the choir’s home church.

“We have something that is unique and world class in this choir,” he asserted, a sentiment echoed by a former Torontonian on the papal staff, Father Owen Keenan, who led the boys into the grandiose basilica, past Swiss Guards in their striped uniforms, announcing “as someone once said, ‘Follow me.’”

When the boys failed to react to the Biblical reference he shook his head, muttering “Tough crowd. Tough crowd.”

Proceeding up to the high altar (Cardinal Collins pointed to Michaelangelo’s Pieta on the way) the boys settled into their stalls on one side of the altar opposite St. Peter’s much smaller resident adult choir, the Cappella Julia, with whom they were to sing in alternation during the mass.

One of the choir’s youngest boy sopranos, 11-year-old Jesus Serrano, sang solo. And to his surprise, just before the service Stephen Handrigan was asked by Vatican authorities to declaim the second reading in English.

Perhaps most touchingly and at Cardinal Collins’ personal request, the boys also sang “What a Friend We have in Jesus,” in a sensitive arrangement made by Kunle Owolabe when still a student at the school.

On the choir’s way out, after the mass, Handrigan turned to one of the boys and asked him if he liked the church. “Yeah,” came the answer. “Pretty big.”

Outside, the square was packed with thousands of people waiting for bells to signal the Angelus and Pope Francis to appear at an upper storey window of his apartment.

In the original plans for the choir’s Rome visit the boys were scheduled to sing for music-loving Pope Benedict XVI in the Sistine Chapel. They still managed to see the chapel but only as tourists. As a sympathizing cleric pointed out, the new pope “couldn’t carry a note in a bucket.”

The boys nevertheless did sing briefly for Pope Francis at his weekly audience in St. Peter’s Square, where they had been preferentially allotted a bloc of seats dead centre in front of the vast crowd.

“I sang here for Pope John XXIII when I was ten years old,” recalled Theresa MacLean, one of the many parents and friends following the choir’s tour, “and I wanted my son to have a similar experience.” As for 12-year-old Francesco, he seemed to be enjoying the experience immensely, calling it “the chance of a lifetime.”

Later in the afternoon, while Francesco and the other younger members of the choir toured Rome by bus, 27 grade 12 students returned to St. Peter’s for a joint rehearsal with the Cappella Julia in preparation for the afternoon Vespers service.

At the rehearsal’s close Father Pierre Paul, the 35-year Vatican veteran from Three Rivers, Que., who directs the Cappella Julia, announced “I am very happy.” He was neither the first nor the last of its Roman listeners to be surprised by the calibre of the Toronto choir’s singing.

Two more houses of worship shared the choir’s attentions the following day, the first of them Cardinal Collins’ official Roman church, St. Patrick’s, near the fashionable Via Veneto, where he heard the boys sing a morning mass in his honour, the second being Canadian Martyrs Church, established in 1955 at the instigation of Pope Pius XII as the official Canadian Catholic Church in Rome.

So tenuous has the latter church’s Canadian connection become in recent years that the resident priest had actually forgotten about the choir’s concert and scheduled a mass to overlap its rehearsal period.

Banished, as a consequence, to a series of chapels in the underground crypt, the three conductors each rehearsed a section of the choir, whose members obligingly sat on the marble floors munching pizza during the remaining time before their performance.

Their subsequent concert, a day later at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, represented a kind of homage to their founder, John Edward Ronan, who had studied there in the early 1930s before founding, in Toronto, one of only six choirs affiliated with the venerable institution.

To mark the occasion, simultaneously celebrating their 75th anniversary and the Pontifical Institute’s 125th, the choir presented an all-Canadian program including music by Monsignor Ronan himself, leaving behind as a remembrance of their visit the late priest’s framed photograph and a volume of his music.

“It’s a beautiful thing we do,” an obviously proud Stephen Handrigan told his charges a day later over dinner, following the papal audience and an afternoon visit to the Roman Coliseum. And Jerzy Cichocki obviously agreed: “This is season 23 for me. I went to the school, I’ve taught here and been an organist on and off. I believe in the place.

“We are not in show business. We are a cathedral choir, preserving the musical traditions of our church. And if you get these kids’ heads in the right place it is amazing what they can do.”

Or as Cardinal Collins put it at the Canadian Martyrs Church concert, quoting St. Augustine, “he who sings prays twice.”

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